possible in the first place. Let us take a moment, then, to look at the rural world of late antique Egypt and the Near East, the world that produced both Shenoute and his admirers.
A fourth-century document written by a certain Papnuthis may be a good starting point. Papnuthis was the agent of an urban landowner in Oxyrhynchus, a city in the middle Nile valley. Sometime between the years 359 and 365, he wrote a letter full of frustration to his employer. People like Papnuthis, usually called pronoētēs in the papyri, played a key role in the rural economy of the ancient world. His job was to collect from the villages around Oxyrhynchus the rents owed by his employer’s tenants, and the taxes for which this landowner, as a member of the civic elite of Oxyrhynchus, was responsible. In the southern village of Berky, however, the local inhabitants did not have a friendly welcome for Papnuthis. The wheat they were supposed to pay was mixed with cheaper barley, and their intention was to measure it using their own measure, which they claimed was equivalent to the standard public one. One of the two villagers who were supposed to help him collect what was due disrespectfully replied, “I don’t have any time,” while the other excused himself simply by saying, “It’s none of my business.” Papnuthis’s letter demanded further instructions from his employer, but he also suggested the use of soldiers, following the example set by another urban magistrate who—with the help of soldiers—“collects from them as he pleases.”6
No reply to this letter has been preserved, but any sensible landowner would have told Papnuthis that having recourse to soldiers was a risky strategy. Soldiers would want their own share, and, more importantly, they were not under the direct control of civic magistrates. Once they were involved in the process of tax or rent collection, there was little stopping them from engaging in this activity for their own benefit. A new, unpredictable interest group standing between urban landowners and rural tenants and taxpayers was the last thing any civic magistrate wanted.
Papnuthis’s troubles were no isolated incident. Fourth-century documents from Egypt contain many such complaints against “rustic audacity” (komētikē authadeia). Stubborn villagers were accused of refusing to pay rents and taxes, and of failing to show deference to their natural superiors. Outside Egypt, too, many late antique landowners expressed a similar sense of outrage. In Gaza, for example, a group of villagers was said to have refused to pay the rents on land owned by the church and to have beaten the church’s steward with clubs. In late sixth-century Asia Minor, the villages belonging to the church were considered to be “a source of constant trouble” for their manager. In Syria, the pagan sophist Libanius of Antioch complained that the peasants had turned into brigands sheltered by powerful military protectors—the very group whose intervention Papnuthis had called for. Tax collectors were welcomed in the same way as bishops intending to convert those villages to “orthodox” Christianity: with rocks.7
It is important to identify precisely what lies behind all these complaints of “rustic audacity.” They do not need to be the symptom of a new communal village identity or of a general, collective peasant resistance. If anything, the case seems to have been the opposite. Numerous documentary and literary sources show that villagers were displaying a remarkable “audacity” not only in their dealings with urban landowners but even more so in their dealings with each other. We have a significant amount of evidence, in this period, for conflicts between villagers and in particular between villages.8 Roger Bagnall has described the Egyptian villages of the fourth century as “rudderless and captainless vessels.” They have few public structures—a characteristic they share with the late antique villages of Syria—and no clearly defined authorities.9 The overwhelming concern with solidarity in Egyptian monastic literature reflects the breakdown of village solidarities that most monks had witnessed earlier in life. Mediating in these conflicts quickly became one of the traditional functions of Egyptian and Syrian holy men such as Shenoute.10
Conflicts between villagers and struggles against the payment of taxes and rents are of course a perennial aspect of rural life in Egypt and elsewhere.11 In late antiquity, however, these issues were magnified by a fundamental and well-known process: the fragmentation of the ruling class and the resulting development of rural patronage. These had been among the unintended consequences of the “Late Roman Revolution.”12 Following the third-century crisis, the Roman Empire reinvented itself in the late third and early fourth centuries and redoubled its efforts to become an effective presence in the life of every one of its inhabitants.13 The roots of this revolution go much further back in time, to the age of the Antonines, but it was only in the late third century that, through the establishment of a “New Deal,” the state took advantage of irreversible social and cultural changes instead of trying to contain them.14 The result, in Egypt and elsewhere, was a dramatic acceleration of some of the historical processes that had been slowly advancing during the previous three centuries of imperial rule.
The Roman state expanded, diversified, and developed a stronger presence at the local level. As a consequence, urban control over the countryside splintered. The collection of rural rents and taxes, the lifeline of an ancient city, came to depend on the cooperation of multiple groups with different and potentially conflicting interests: the civic councilors themselves, the military hierarchy, the provincial governor and members of his staff (officium), former magistrates (honorati), administrators of imperial land (domus divina), and eventually the clergy and monks. The institutional pluralism that is so characteristic of late Roman society supplied the rural population with a large pool of enterprising would-be patrons. As a result, competing patronage networks flourished in the countryside in this period and gave villagers unprecedented room to play patron against patron and thus to acquire the “audacity” that troubled landowners so much.15 These vertical relations of rural patronage threatened not only other patrons and landowners, but also the always-fragile horizontal solidarity of the rural population. They did this, above all, by offering new, disruptive opportunities: the opportunity to abandon one’s village and settle at a more attractive estate settlement; the opportunity to enjoy differential protection; the opportunity to evade taxes; the opportunity to lease vineyards, which required large investments beyond the reach of most peasants; the opportunity to become a monk.
Moreover, the capillary presence of the state in rural areas threatened to bypass cities and to deprive them of their traditional control of the surrounding countryside. The juridical and economic unity between city and its dependent rural hinterland, so defining for the classical city, can no longer be taken for granted in late antiquity.16 Many cities, in particular those that did not become capitals of the new, smaller provinces, had a hard time adjusting to the new situation.17 The well-known case of the struggle between the large village of Aphrodito and the town of Antaeopolis—both located not far from Shenoute’s monastery—shows what might be at stake for the city in such a situation. In the fifth century Aphrodito had gained the right to pay much of its taxes directly to the imperial government by delivering them to the provincial capital, Antinoe, instead of having them collected by magistrates of the nearby city of Antaeopolis.18 The domus divina, one of the many new branches of the central government with a local presence, had apparently become Aphrodito’s patron and protector.19 This was unacceptable for the elite of Antaeopolis: it threatened to curtail its influence in the countryside and to reduce the profits brought by tax collection. It threatened, in other words, to reduce the city to the status of a simple village to the advantage of the provincial capital.20 The result was a prolonged conflict in which the village elite of Aphrodito appealed constantly to the provincial governors and even directly to the emperor against the encroachment of the local civic authorities, who must have regarded Aphrodito’s ambitions as nothing more than another case of “rustic audacity.” A member of this village elite, the notary and poetaster Dioscorus, eventually moved to the provincial capital, where he made a living as a notary drafting petitions on behalf of members of his village and other provincials. In the end, the village lost its privilege, but the fact that it could put up such a long and tenacious fight is revealing.21
A corollary of this partial
